


to break this wave in our way

by aosc



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-25 13:49:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14978468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/aosc
Summary: Two years, or seven hundred and thirty days.





	to break this wave in our way

* * *

 

It starts out tentatively, halting, as though now that all of the adrenaline has worn off, neither of them is sure of where to start.

 

”How long do you think we’ll be stuck here?” Keith asks. He rights himself, stooped over the logs they’re attempting to spark a fire out of, and slashes one rock across the other. Nothing.

 

Krolia, hands on her hips, gaze steadily tracking their course up ahead, replies, “I couldn’t say. It could be quintants, or phoebs, or longer – time moves in ways unknown to us here. What we interpret as time isn’t necessarily applicable in the abyss.”

 

Keith cuts the stones against one another again. No spark. “Okay…” he says, trying for non-awkward but wondering how the hell that’s going to be possible, “So…”

 

Krolia turns back to him. She spots his aborted attempt at lighting the fire, and Keith thinks – that might be the scurry of a smile across her face. “You’re going to need to spark with the sharp ends. If the rock’s too blunt you’re going to be trying to light a fire until we get out of here, however long it’ll take.”

 

Keith raises an eyebrow. “You do it then,” he says. He throws her the stones.

 

She catches both, snaps them out of the air with practiced ease. She takes two long steps towards the fireplace and crouches over the logs. She grates the stones once, twice, massaging them against one another, and then snaps her wrist.

 

A spark falls, big and bright, and catches on the wood. She does it again. A shower of light births from it with a crackle. The log catches fire. Krolia rises. She hands Keith the stones again. “Be decisive,” she says. “Most of the time, that’s all it takes.”

 

*

 

Keith isn’t sure he’d call it a wolf, but when Krolia wrangles something out in Galran, and then says, “In Basic, I believe you’d call it a wolf cub,” he supposes he can’t really call it anything else. So, it’s a space wolf. Cool.

 

“How’s it possible there are _wolves_ living on the back of a giant dimension-travelling whale alien?” Keith says, unable to contain how, if not fucked up, cosmically weird this is. Obviously, in the handful of years he’s been stuck in unchartered space, he’s managed to see some weird stuff – but these past couple of weeks has seen that can of worms get a lot bigger and weirder.

 

Krolia seems nonplussed about the question, even if she had looked pretty amazed when the cub they’d rescued had stayed, awkwardly long limbed in the ways of adolescent animals, yapping and curious and completely unwary of them.

 

“There’s so much we don’t know about the universe,” she says, “Most of the time you just have to accept it exactly for what it is.”

 

Keith sits down next to the cub, his crouch beginning to strain, “Well, yeah, obviously. But you can’t deny this is weird. Like, as in a whole new dimension of weird-kind of way.”

 

She allows a soft chuckle. More of an amused hum, but, Keith thinks, glancing quickly at her and then away: he’ll take what he can get.

 

*

 

“You’re too angry,” Krolia says, completely unfazed and straight legged as the hellish juxtaposition to Keith’s panting, his shaking legs and arms meeting in a half crouch.

 

“Yeah? It’s what got me this far though!” he launches forward again, blade at guard before his throat and his other arm at half mast to protect his guts.

 

Krolia sidesteps easily, but Keith knows she will, so he shifts his weight over to his right foot and throws himself vertically to intercept her path. She brings her own blade up to clash against his. Keith leans forward, putting the pressure on her to either counter or back up.

 

She’s barely broken a sweat, detaining a calculated frown and a loosely bitten jaw. It hadn’t fazed him up until now. He knows it’s because he’s rapidly tiring, and she isn’t, and he’s tried to talk himself down. But he remembers, drawing on something Allura’d said about his compatibility with Red – because he’s uncalculated, and brash, and quick because of his temper, not due to his tactical prowess.

 

Keith disengages and throws himself backwards. He sucks in breaths through his nose, out through his mouth. He looks around the flat space they’re using for training; sandy and plush beneath his boots, kind of badly maneuverable. If he could just use that to his advantage – but Krolia is both lighter on her feet and more experienced in combat than he is. The chance that he’d manage to get the drop on her by outsmarting her –

 

Keith looks back to where she’d stood, just a moment too late, just a little too distracted by his own inabilities. Krolia kicks up a whorl of sand and dust, and ducks right into the void. Keith brings his guard up again and starts backing up.

 

The strike, once it comes, comes from below.

 

Krolia comes sliding out of it in a tackle, one leg stretched to take out his ankle, the other bent. Keith is just able to react quickly enough to throw the blade and brace himself for the backwards fall. Krolia crooks her shin around the leg of his that’s come unbalanced, and tugs him along. Keith tries to tug loose mid-fall, but she doesn’t budge. It’s all he can do to twist both arms behind himself and have his wrists take the brunt of his weight.

 

The impact travels jarring through his arms, scoring something in his left elbow that leaves Keith biting down on a groan. He tries to leverage himself up to propel him forward. Krolia, still tangled up in his legs, crooks her other leg behind his back, and twists harshly. Keith feels his trajectory change without being able to stop it. The strength of his push makes him tip wayward of her shoulder, ending up on his forearms on the side of her instead. Krolia quickly releases him, turns up, and hooks his left arm instead. She secures it in the small of his back and leans over him. Keith knows he’s lost by the way she presses the blunt of her blade to the base of his throat.

 

“Yield?” she asks. She’s barely winded.

 

Keith clenches his jaw. “Yield,” he grits out.

 

She releases him immediately.

 

*

 

She’s not like his previous teachers, he thinks, once he realizes that despite how many philosophical bits she probably could’ve spouted once they’d ended that sparring session, and however many pointers he probably could’ve used from her, she doesn’t say anything about it.

 

He has to come to her and outright ask for it. It puts them in a position that clearly should establish rank, he thinks, but mostly, it just makes him think that – maybe she doesn’t know how to actually boss him around as _him_. Not as a subordinate, but as her – he swallows past the oddness of the sentence, and forces himself to think it: as her son.

 

“You said I’m too angry,” he says, over the spitting of the fire.

 

Krolia looks up from the curl of her palm, where she’s shielding a piece of roasted, purplish cabbage plant they’d found upon an earlier trek.

 

“You are,” she says, and after a beat, “Not that I’m blaming you. I understand that you have reason to be.”

 

Keith purses his lips. “I didn’t – “ he starts. He tries again, “I mean, in a combat situation.”

 

“Oh,” she says, as if caught off guard by the clarification. As if she hadn’t thought about it that way.

 

It makes Keith feel warmth spread across his nose, embarrassed by how plainly she’s seemed to sense that most of all, he’s not content, he’s not driven by a sense of purpose – but mostly by his emotions, by a sense of disquiet.

 

“I want to become a better fighter. I thought I was, with the training Kolivan’s been helping me with. But you made it look – so easy. And then you said that – “

 

“Keith,” Krolia interrupts, “What you have to realize is that there’s such a monumental gap in experience between you and me. If I hadn’t been able to make it look easy, well, then something would’ve been very wrong.”

 

“But you can teach me,” Keith presses on.

 

“I can.” Krolia tears another strip of the cabbage. Her expression morphs into something thoughtful, “Anger is, if channeled correctly, a battle primer unlike anything else. But as soon as you let it take over, it’s going to hamper you more than it will help you.”

 

“I’m not a very tactical fighter, though,” says Keith wryly.

 

Krolia frowns. “Who said that?”

 

“I don’t know – many?”

 

“You’re a very tactical fighter, Keith,” Krolia replies. “I’m not sure whoever said that has ever seen you fight.”

 

“But it’s true – I don’t analyze my opponent, or adapt my style to the situation. Most of the time I just, try and hit them hard and quick and hope that’s enough.”

 

“Well. Most of the time, that is enough. Or it has to be. Especially for us, it’s not many times we get the luxury of assessing our enemy before they’re right there, and you have to be so quick about it. To be able to analyze your opponent in the heat of battle is a skill you acquire over time – not being able to at your age doesn’t tell anyone anything about whether you’re a tactical fighter or not.”

 

Keith – sits back. He’s not really sure what to say. “And if you think about it,” Krolia says, “Fighting to your own advantages – isn’t that pretty tactical?”

 

“Everyone does that,” Keith argues, “That’s not special. If you don’t fight to your own advantages you’re not gonna do any good.”

 

“Not everyone does that,” Krolia disagrees, “Most recruits I’ve handled respond so strongly to their mentor, and to what you teach them, that the instinct with which you fight is a little bit lost. Of course, if you’re better with a range weapon, and do worse in close combat, you can alter your approach. But most of that has nothing to do with how you actually go into the fight itself, and what you do when you’re in it.”

 

“So, instinct’s good?”

 

“Instinct is what keeps you alive. If you can’t trust anyone, at least trust your instincts.”

 

*

 

The next time a wave of disrupted space continuum washes over them, Keith’s asleep, and sinks into the memory like it’s a dream. The colors are starch, but retain a sort of dreamy quality, peach fuzzy around the edges.

 

_She’s taken a knee in front of Commander Trezn. Her head is throbbing, her split lip swollen with blood. One tooth has been knocked loose, and her shoulder is sore. The things you do to look the part of an escapee._

_“And you are able to swear that your absence was due to your imprisonment at the hands of Terrans?”_

_“Put me on the witch’s table if you won’t trust my word, sir,” Krolia says. She rubs at her hip – a bruise the size of a fist is quickly forming over her side. “We found no lion – only an ambush, our faction massacred and our means to return destroyed. Each individual ship’s tracker will tell you the same thing.”_

_“Not one operative but you made it out, lieutenant,” says the commander._

_“That’s correct, sir.”_

_“According to the data pulled from the ships’ cloud memory storage, out of the original scouting party, only you as much as made Terran atmosphere.”_

_“Terrans are not so primitive and ignorant as initially imagined, sir. The believed site of the blue lion hosts a large military and aeronautical complex, one which operates a cloaked atmo-bound scouting party at all times. This surprised us – given the lack of intel we’d received prior to shipping out. We were ambushed. I managed to make it, though at the expense of my ship, as well as the remainder of my unit.” She pauses, and counts her heartbeat until it’s steady, until she feels the loss of – of everything, less acutely, “What I found was a vast expanse of desert wasteland, and a Terran strike team already primed for my arrival.”_

_She looks up from the floor. The dour light of Commander Trezn’s command bridge makes him look a lot more intimidating, towering before her, than Krolia knows him as. Still – one with ties as strong to the Emperor, and a temper as uncalculated, she has to play her part with extreme caution._

_He meets her gaze, his expression pinched with distrust. Krolia waits. She retains her hunched shoulders, the slope of her back. The gratitude in having been accepted on board again, following her escape from a three deca-phoeb long imprisonment._

_Trezn signals for one his officials to step forward. “Take an escort down to the infirmary, lieutenant. I’ll not have you debriefed by the emperor himself looking like you are.”_

_“Yes, sir,” Krolia replies. Something jars loose in her chest. Something like relief. What Terra did to her – it turned her soft._

_“And get up from the floor, lieutenant. I’d not know you to be this pathetically subservient.”_

_Krolia rises slowly. She straightens her shoulders. It pulls on her damaged one. She taps her chest. “Vrepit sa.”_

_Trezn gives a jerky nod. “Vrepit sa.”_

 

*

 

“How did you do it – all those years?” is the first thing Keith asks once he wakes up.

 

Krolia is rubbing more wood into the glowing embers of the sooty, burnt down fire. She doesn’t look back at Keith as he stretches, and comes out from beneath the arc of the cave to place himself opposite her. “Some things aren’t choices you make. You just have to do them.”

 

“You were undercover for so long, though.”

 

Krolia hums. “I was good at it.”

 

“So good at it that it never bothered you – working for those guys?”

 

She looks up. She tilts her head. “What’s the question here, Keith?”

 

Keith shakes his head. “No, nothing like that. I don’t – I’m just wondering how you could _take_ it.”

 

This time, she smiles, softly and barely. “Some things make it bearable.”

 

*

 

The wolf cub isn’t such a cub anymore. Dubbed Yorak – either because Keith is horrible at hiding the sentimental streak deeply burrowed inside him, or because it’s only started to resurface for real after the achingly long look Krolia had given him when he’d suggested it – it now reaches Keith’s waist, and it’s able to tackle him solidly to the ground whenever it feels like it.

 

Despite the naming, and how Yorak’s now inexplicably fitted to Keith’s hip at pretty much any given moment, Krolia still asks, “Are you going to keep it?” dubiously, like she doesn’t really see how an addition to their party’s going to do them any good.

 

“Well, yeah,” Keith says. He scratches at one of Yorak’s ears. The wolf pants softly, sinking down into sitting at his side. “He’s getting pretty domesticated, so.”

 

“It’s a wolf,” Krolia says, “I think you’re overestimating how domesticated they ever get.”

 

Keith glances at her. “Leaving him on the back of a giant dimension-crossing space whale seems pretty dour.”

 

“I think he’d be fine.”

 

Keith regards the wolf. He continues panting, tongue lolling. He’s rolled up on the ground, tail beating rhythmically to whenever Keith crooks his fingers and scratches particularly hard. “Maybe. Or, probably. But I think he’d do better if he got to come with us. Sometimes it’s better to go someplace, rather than stay in the same one and hope it works out, y’know?”

 

Krolia looks at him for a long while. Then she shakes her head, and smiles. She reaches out and gives Keith’s temple a light shove, his hair a tug.

 

*

 

Keith wipes his brow, making the final step up over the ridge. The atmosphere, usually clear and easily breathable, changes with where they are within the abyss. It’s not like there’s a sun and a moon and climate changes, but sometimes, the nights are cool and the air is thin, and sometimes, like now, it’s oppressive and weighing on your shoulders, your lungs.

 

“Hey, I think we made it,” he says. He cradles his palm on his brow.

 

Krolia steps up on his left side. Keith’s still getting used to how soundless she manages to be, on the freaky side of too quiet, almost. “So it seems,” she says. “It’s quite the view.”

 

It is. Above, the noiseless void of the abyss stares down at them, unblinking and black. And ahead, so far that for all of how big it must be, it becomes so small, is a prick of light. Like the sun sunk just on top of the horizon, it’s barely anything if Keith crooks his finger around its picture.

 

But it represents the end of their journey. Of making it out on the other side, and seeing through what they’d started on.

 

“You think it’s far?” Keith asks.

 

“I think that it’s taken us this long to get to where we can spot the other side,” Krolia replies. She pauses. “I don’t think this part of the universe is out to do anyone any favors.”

 

Keith snorts. “Yeah. Probably not. What do you think’s on the other side?”

 

“Answers,” Krolia replies. “To what, I can’t say. But answers.”

 

*

 


End file.
